Agents of SHIELD EP Jeff Bell on Mockingbird and Hunter Departure and Marvel's Most Wanted

It's time to say goodbye to Bobbi Morse (Adrianne Palicki) and Lance Hunter (Nick Blood) -- but hopefully not for long. The two Agents of SHIELD stars had their farewell episode in "Parting Shot," and in doing so set up their in-development spinoff series, Marvel's Most Wanted.

ABC ordered the show to pilot earlier this year, and Palicki and Blood have since shot it with showrunners Jeff Bell and Paul Zbyszewski, both of whom are also producers on Agents of SHIELD. They're still putting the finishing touches on the pilot before sending it off to the network to see if it will be picked up to series, and Bell got on the phone to talk about the Mockingbird and Hunter goodbye and what is potentially to come on the new show.

"I hope we touch all the feeling buttons in tonight's episode for them," Bell told IGN. "There's a lot more stories at SHIELD to be told. Even as they go off to do separate things, their absence will affect the team."

Read on for Bell's full interview where he discusses the pilot that's been shot for Marvel's Most Wanted, why now was the right time for Bobbi and Hunter to leave the team and how Angel impacted his creation of this show.

Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: "Parting Shot" Photos

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Adrianne Palicki on Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

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Adrianne Palicki on Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: "Parting Shot" Photos

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IGN: Why was now the right time to send Hunter and Bobbi off on SHIELD?

Bell: Because they physically had to go leave to shoot the pilot. Pretty simple. We've shot the pilot and we're in post on it, but they had to stop being on SHIELD and get ready for the pilot and then shoot the pilot and all of that, so it didn't make sense for us to have all these episodes with them and then not have them in two or three episodes, and then go, "Oh, we were just over here," and then come back and go away again. On many levels, it was a practical issue. It's also anything can happen at any time on this show, and I love that about the show as well.

IGN: This felt like a very final goodbye, and though I'm sure you could find a way to get them back on Agents of SHIELD if needed, why did you decide to make their exit have such finality?

Bell: The big reason is this is not Marvel's Agents of SHIELD: Muncy. It's not the same type of stories in a different city with them starting up their own branch of SHIELD or something. We want to be clear we're telling a different type of story, and in doing so, you don't want to be telling a story where you go, "Why don't they call Coulson? He can fix this easily," because that line's been cut. Not that you can't bring them back someday or have someone from SHIELD show up on this show, but it's really setting up a different universe, and part of that is Dominic Fortune -- who Delroy Lindo is playing -- and that's really more about Hunter's past. You have ex-spies, you have mercenaries and contract players, and folks who are no longer in the game and taking care of things that are more in the gray. That's more his world than hers, which I think is fun. It allows us to tell a different kind of story.

IGN: Since you have now brought your script with Paul Zbyszewski to life, did anything surprise you about the show in the process of making the pilot? Was there anything unexpected you found about what the show could become?

Bell: We're still finishing it, but what was really heartening was Nick and Adrianne as Bobbi and Hunter are really good together and they have a great chemistry. We knew that from SHIELD, but that was reaffirmed. It helps that they really like each other and so they enjoy working together. I think that chemistry shows up on screen. The rest of our cast is terrific with Delroy and the others, and Billy Gierhart who directed it brought a strong visual style to it.

IGN: In Angel, you had experience working on a spinoff show that created its own identity that felt different than the original series. What lessons did you learn from that that you applied to Marvel's Most Wanted?

Bell: That's a good question. I was not there at the very, very beginning of Angel, but ran it the last three years. I would say one of the things we had to learn was even though it came out of Joss [Whedon]'s and David Greenwalt's brain, and even though the characters were from Buffy, you had to tell the stories very differently, and a big part of that is who your protagonist was. On Buffy, you had a 16-year-old girl. The stories, if you go back and watch them, kind of unfolded slowly. They were structured emotionally rather than from plot almost all the time. It was sort of this slow burn. ... It was a pace that felt truthful when you were centered on some kids in high school and this girl.

I think when the Angel stories first started being told, there was a similar pace to them. I wasn't there those first two years so I can't speak to it other than one of the things I was aware of was -- because we had David Boreanaz as a 200-year-old vampire with, if not life, then at least a lot of testosterone -- it needed to be structured differently and you needed to come in with a stronger, bigger teaser, like a big grab-you kind of thing. The fact that he was nominally a detective meant there was a big mystery at the heart of each show. Even though it got serialized, it felt like the external events were driving story more than the internal drive of, say, Buffy.

Buffy was driven kind of by what was going on inside of her. "Do I want to do this? I'm not confident with this. I really don't want to be this hero, but I have to. OK, we've hung out, I guess we should go to the graveyard." For Angel, it was so much more an external thing that ultimately made him look inside and go, "I can't redeem what I've done so I just keep doing the external work. If I can't save me, at least I can save other people." That's an intellectual thing I can look back on now, but at the time we were trying to find a way to give Angel its own voice, and I think we all did. It's not always right out of the gate you know what the new show is.

IGN: It sounds like there might be some parallels between the Bobbi/Hunter series and Angel.

Bell: It's also at the heart of it is the relationship, so you can build. What's the metaphor of the relationship that's going to dramatize over the course of the episode versus the larger machinations of the world that SHIELD find themselves in? In some ways it's a more intimate show because of that.

IGN: Do you find yourself drawing on any specific comic arcs as you're looking forward, or are you hinged upon the mythology that Agents of SHIELD has created for itself?

Bell: Honestly, right now we're just trying to get the pilot done. We have thoughts about how to go forward, but really it's about just sticking the landing of Agents of SHIELD this season.

IGN: Is there any chance we'll see Bobbi and Hunter on SHIELD again this season, or was this departure pretty final for now?

Bell: I can't answer that, but I can say it would be kind of cheating to make Mack cry like that only to buy it back -- not that we haven't brought characters back from the dead. We want to earn stuff.

IGN: How emotional was it to shoot that scene? I was getting emotional just watching the farewell.

Bell: When Paul was pitching it in the room, he was getting choked up, we were in the room getting choked up, and then we all read it and we got choked up. At the table read, where everyone is saying goodbye, everyone is getting choked up there and I'm reading the narrative drive and I'm trying to keep my voice from sounding like it's going to cry. And then on the day at the bar that we shot at, everybody was a mess. [laughs] For them, they were also leaving to go shoot the pilot. It wasn't just a pretend thing; these were people who had worked together for a couple of years and see each other every day and formed relationships.

IGN: I know this ultimately comes down to what the network orders, but are you conceiving Marvel's Most Wanted to run concurrent to Agents of SHIELD with 22 episodes or have a shorter run?

Bell: Right now it's just the pilot. Sure, do we have some ideas, absolutely, but whether we can do those in 10 or 13 or whether it's a 22, you have to plan for usually they order 13. You have to at least be able to have a plan to be able to go out there, and then have a plan for if it there's more, maybe we can do this. In terms of details, that's future-us's problem.

Terri Schwartz is Entertainment Editor at IGN. Talk to her on Twitter at @Terri_Schwartz.